Montessori Geography Bundle: Learning to Research

I love Montessori geography and so do my kids. Our continent boxes are always one of their favorite works to take off the shelf, and one of our most lent out materials. But a continent box is just a jumping off point for learning, so I wanted to share with you a Montessori Geography Bundle that I created to help guide children who are ready to move on to the next step and start researching. In the Montessori style, this Bundle contains materials designed for multiple ages, making it perfect for your homeschooling class!

Montessori Geography Bundle for Early Writers

Maria Montessori didn’t believe that nascent writing skills should slow any child down from learning, and with that in mind I’ve tried to create reports that will help early readers and writers be successful at research.

Learning how to research is an important skill. In order to do it well, a child needs to be able to listen, comprehend, and sift through information to pull out what’s important. They then need to be able to put that information into their own words. This is obviously a lengthy process and will take many years, but this geography bundle is designed to help with that.

There are 3 early writer reports: a continent report, a country report, and an animal report. I usually give free choice about which report we’re going to do, and we often complete multiple animal reports for each continent, as they are a favorite.

Each is written in fill-in-the-blank format, with full sentences because our main aim is to help the child recognize what the important information is, and not get stuck on the task of writing everything down. The design will give them ample opportunity to practice their handwriting and spelling, without the task becoming overwhelming.

When working on the early writer reports with your child, I recommend choosing a single resource to work from, a book or encyclopedia article that will have all the information they need. Then read the book or article together, talking as you go to ensure that they’re understanding what’s being read to them. Then, we take out the report, and go through the sentences one by one.

Depending on your child’s comprehension and retention, they may remember every fact. That’s wonderful. The next step is for them to write it down. I usually help G with the spelling, either by writing the word she wants to use on a white board or by helping her find it in the text itself, if it’s a text she is able to read on her own.

If your child doesn’t remember the answers, that’s wonderful to! You get to model how to look up an answer! I usually start by wondering aloud what section of the book might we look in? Then I go through, modeling scanning pages for the word I’m looking for with my finger. When I find the section, I don’t just read the sentence that contains what they’re looking for. I’ll read about a paragraph above and one below, to give another chance to pick out the information.

Montessori Geography Bundle for More Advanced Readers and Writers

Of course there are those children who are ready to dive right into researching on their own, and for them I’ve written a bundle that contains 3 sets of research questions: one for continents, one for countries, and one for landmarks.

Unlike the early writers reports, these are a series of questions, designed to help your burgeoning researcher hunt for and find important information on their own. The questions are designed to be relatively comprehensive, and can’t be answered in one sitting.

Depending on your child’s age or skill, these questions can be used in multiple ways.

For a child who is just starting out, then a simple 1 sentence answer to each question might be sufficient. These can be written on the page or on an accompanying page.

For a child who is ready for more, I recommend using them as the skeleton for a research report- having the child spend time reading through multiple books and articles, answering them as they find the information.

Some children will have neat enough and small enough handwriting to write their answers on the paper itself, but most will not. Each question can be written at the top of a large notecard, which will give ample space for answers.

When beginning a research project, I always make sure to teach my student to write the answers to the questions in single word form or small phrases instead of full sentences. This helps decrease unintended plagiarism later. Once all the questions are answered, then we turn them into full sentences and put them together.